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Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

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Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#131

Post by zimbatm »

jusben1369 wrote: post #94

I'm not sure I believe any of this for reasons others have pointed out. But let's say it's true. Is this an argument for or against Net Neutrality? By most accounts I read NetFlix is responsible for 30% + of evening internet traffic. Kind of staggering. If an ISP actively throttled Netflix people would leave that ISP for another one that didn't throttle Netflix Netflix is clearly a hugely popular service with enough…

It's simple. NetFlix is already paying for that traffic. The users are already paying to get access to the Internet. The ISPs are trying to make complicated arguments so that they can get away with charging the same traffic twice.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#132

Post by padseeker »

kordless wrote: post #109
padseeker wrote: post #55

How do we, IT savvy people capable of monitoring, testing and verifying this stuff, use our collective skills to monitor each ISP and communicate who is doing the best/worst job? As long as there is at least one ISP provider who is not throttling traffic, we should reward that ISP that does not discriminate on web traffic, and punish the ones that do. You might have to show some differences across different regions a…

I'm with you. The primary problem we'll have is the 'reward' system in locales with only one provider. You'll have to focus on markets with multiple providers. The solution involves building an escrowed Bitcoin fund which does payouts based on provider's aggregate throughput. How that is implemented, I have no idea.

I was thinking a lot simpler - keep tabs on each ISP in each market. Determine who has the least discriminatory network. Once enough data is collected you can make recommendations. ISP X is the best, ISP Y is the worst, anyone who cares needs to switch from ISP Y to ISP X. No bitcoin needed.

You can have a coordinated event, a cancellation day where all users of ISP Y cancel on the same day and switch to ISP X. Make a big deal about it. Tell your friends about it.

The one concern I have is in certain markets there might not be enough competition. If all the providers in that market are throttling then you have a stronger case for the government to get involved. Heck, there might even be collusion in those markets. But you might be able to bypass any government enforcement of Net Neutrality if there are enough well informed consumers punishing the bad ISPs and patronizing the good ISPs. It aint rocket science.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#133

Post by brianmcdonough »

padseeker wrote: post #55

How do we, IT savvy people capable of monitoring, testing and verifying this stuff, use our collective skills to monitor each ISP and communicate who is doing the best/worst job? As long as there is at least one ISP provider who is not throttling traffic, we should reward that ISP that does not discriminate on web traffic, and punish the ones that do. You might have to show some differences across different regions a…

I want to express my gratitude for your thoughtful and more effective approach. The aha! nature of this article and the sensationalistic title lead me to believe that it's a knee jerk reaction.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#134

Post by stox »

twoodfin wrote: post #92
nathan_long wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An excellent test. If a VPN makes something faster, despite the fact that it adds overhead to the process , that seems like proof that it's being throttled.

Not necessarily. It might just be bypassing the congested route that everyone else on your ISP is using. Comcast and Verizon have had disagreements peering with Cogent, one of Netflix's ISPs: http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about... It's not throttling, but rather the peering points along the "best" route between Cogent and Comcast/Verizon are overloaded, resulting in lousy connections between…

Disagreements with Cogent? Well, I never....

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#135

Post by lucb1e »

eksith wrote: post #68
lucb1e wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Fiber is the worst idea ever. You know this company makes the vast majority of its income through advertising and collecting data about you, right? I understand that it's a great service for a great price, but the question is how long that remains sustainable. Right now they're sitting on such a pile of money that it doesn't matter whether they provide internet access in a few cities at a super cheap price. Th…

Google disallowed servers initially as a non-insignificant number of people thought of the service as an easy entry into mass virtual hosting as soon as they got it. That started to affect throughput[1]. As mentioned numerous times elsewhere, their ultimate goal is to embarrass ISPs into providing better service. That seems to be working in Texas ATM. The hobbyists that complained got an exemption in their TOS for no…

> (Verizon and Comcast hijack domain misspellings to redirect to their search pages)

What?! Thought only OpenDNS (and similar services) did that bullshit, and in their case I can understand. In the case of an ISP... you're paying them already!

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#136

Post by twoodfin »

jkrems wrote: post #130
twoodfin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's at best the average cost. You can also deliver a few terabytes for something like $3 in postage if you ship a tape, but that average cost would be deceptively low if you were trying to use that bandwidth to watch Netflix. The real cost is building the infrastructure to handle higher and higher peak bandwidth. Suppose you're Comcast with 20 million subscribers, half of whom are trying to watch 5Mbit Super-HD Ne…

If you offer unlimited bandwidth and it's not working out financially, the solution is one of the two: 1. Increase the price for the subscription 2. Remove unlimited bandwidth for the subscription and go back to volume based models It's pretty simple, really. You offer a product where cost is higher than revenue? Change the product, change your process, or change the price.

I don't understand: If under total load, with every customer pulling the maximum possible bandwidth simultaneously, Comcast could give you 250Kbps, you want them to sell a product that only gives you 250Kbps all the time just so their advertising will be accurate?

Like everything else, there's fine print: 20Mbps or whatever is described as a maximum speed, and many people actually see burst speeds that high. But as it would be unreasonable to be upset you can't get 20Mbps to Nigeria, it's also somewhat unreasonable to be completely upset at Comcast that you can't get 20Mbps to Netflix if Netflix is paying for cheap ISPs that won't fairly peer. I'm not sufficiently informed to take sides in that dispute, but I can easily imagine that Cogent (for example) is dumping way more traffic into Comcast than Comcast is dumping into it, and trying to get away without paying for that disparity.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#138

Post by brianmcdonough »

The net neutrality issue is a tragedy of the commons. Say you have a common green area and everyone shares it. People come and picnic and everything's great until a family of giants moves into town and sits on the entire green.

Netflix is like that family of giants.

The solution is to build a bigger green, but how is that going to be funded. Customers don't want to pay for it and feel they're already being overcharged. Netflix doesn't want to pay for it just because they are streaming giant files. Such costs are not built into their ability to make profits.

It's a common tragedy.

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#139

Post by eli »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #99
waps wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The netflix data itself points to a gradual lowering of bandwidth to their service. Now here's 2 scenarios : 1) Verizon decided to enter some router configurations that affect the packet forwarding to Netflix (well, most likely FROM netflix, as the internet is not actually symmetrical). What we should see as a result of this is a sudden change in bandwidth. 2) The load on the interfaces in between is changing, either…

> The basic problem is that a linear increase in bandwidth for the customer results in an exponential increase in costs for the ISP > N * (N - 1) =~ N^2 (assuming full duplex links, which would be generally correct for the internet) 1) N^2 is not exponential, it's polynomial. 2) Expanding capacity isn't even N^2, it's just linear. If you double each residential customer's bandwidth, you "only" have to double the capa…

> Because just giving everybody a connection which is twice as fast doesn't mean everybody is going to immediately double their usage.

My understanding is that peak load is the issue, not total data transferred in a month. If Netflix downloads/buffers video content as fast as it can, and people mostly use Netflix at the same time of day, then giving them more bandwidth is a potentially big problem

Re: Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix?

#140

Post by lucb1e »

Fogest wrote: post #77
lucb1e wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Fiber is the worst idea ever. You know this company makes the vast majority of its income through advertising and collecting data about you, right? I understand that it's a great service for a great price, but the question is how long that remains sustainable. Right now they're sitting on such a pile of money that it doesn't matter whether they provide internet access in a few cities at a super cheap price. Th…

They would be stupid to allow servers. Buy your own business line if you want that. Google doesn't want others losing bandwidth because some people want to run servers.

There is a reason the internet was designed with end to end connectivity in mind. If my ISP randomly start filtering packets, like AWS traffic or incoming TCP SYN packets, net neutrality is broken and I will break the contract with that ISP right away. Contract or not, they won't get another penny.

It's a different matter if I consume 5TB of data per month and it's costing them a lot of money on bandwidth to upstream providers. But filtering servers altogether is plain old evil. It doesn't cost them anything and they don't have to decide what's right for me.

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